Greyhound Story, Essay Example

The above passage stimulates humor within the reader through a sardonic rhetoric that both picks apart standards of low-level-budget travel while warranting the necessity for patience and keeping one’s calm.  However, although the content was sufficiently entertaining, I found myself often quibbling with typographical and stylistic considerations of the text which reinforced decisions I would not make within my own writings.

One consideration the author makes concurrently, in regard to punctuation, deals with colons which—although they are not used improperly per se—become somewhat of a stylistic nuisance after their unremitting occurrence.

More specifically, colon-usage in instances such as the subsequent quotation seem not only miscued but detrimental to the continuity and flow of the overall work: “Given the clientele I noted in the predawn darkness, the answer appeared to be: on crutches.” Rather than inserting the colon here, perhaps it would have been more aesthetically and vocally pleasing to rely on italics for the fragment “on crutches.”

This ostensibly minor typographical example then leads into my more pressing stylistic contention: hyperextended (though grammatically feasible) sentences.  The vocal quality of the work, from the reader’s perspective, may appear rather shoddy/poorly contrived at times, especially when he or she is asked to endure taxing lines of misbegotten attempts toward stylistic whimsicality.  For instance, midway through the text, we find ourselves bombarded with a sentence beginning, “It was his hair, though, that was most worthy of note, for his large sunburned head…”  Yet, this is only one of several unnecessarily prolonged renderings.  On a more interactive level, this vocal style could be likened to a young child rambling to the dismay of an elder with the hopes of maintaining the latter’s dwindling attention.

Accordingly, description is sometimes better delivered in less drawn-out doses.  Perhaps, a denser syntax could replace the verboseness of this particular passage without necessarily eschewing less intellectually inclined readers (the writing is still, nevertheless, a fairly intellectual meditation…despite its casual appeal.)

Overall, I enjoyed the humorous narrative voice constructing the story’s content in such a way that it greatly minimized my attention to the unfavorable typography.  However, reshaping some of the author’s stylistic decisions might have a positive impact toward experiencing the overall work.

Gaging my own experience with this work has been a teaching moment in that I realized (for myself on a subjective level) the precedence narrative voice claims in comparison to textual voice.  Often, the typographical and stylistic implications were subsumed within the sarcastically cynical tone of the narrator.